By Clotaire Achi
PARIS (Reuters) – Some 245 evacuees from Sudan, including 195 French nationals, landed in Paris on Wednesday, expressing relief at escaping the heavy fighting and chaos.
Sudan erupted in warfare on April 15, derailing a transition to civilian democracy, since when the paramilitaries have embedded themselves in residential districts and the army has sought to target them from the air.
The fighting has turned residential areas into battlefields. Air strikes and artillery have killed at least 459 people, wounded more than 4,000, destroyed hospitals and limited food distribution in a nation where a third of its 46 million people rely on food aid.
“I felt completely paralysed,” said 28-year-old PhD student Leila Oulkebous, one of the evacuees landing at Charles de Gaulle airport and greeted by Foreign Minister Catherine Colonna. Oulkebous was out and about doing interviews for her thesis when fighting broke out nearby.
“I didn’t know what to do, I didn’t know how to get out…,” she said. “I’m very, very relieved. I still can’t believe (it) … I will continue to have nightmares about it.”
Several countries have evacuated nationals by air, while some have gone via Port Sudan on the Red Sea, about 800 km (500 miles) by road from Khartoum.
“We lived through a week of chaos … it was very difficult,” said Franck Haaser, cooperation councillor at the French Embassy in Sudan, relieved that there were no deaths among those evacuated.
“The shooting was all across the city. We didn’t directly see the shooting, but with the intensity of the fighting, there were stray bullets everywhere, broken windows in all buildings, it was chaos. Chaos.”
(Reporting by Clotaire Achi and Stephanie Lecocq, writing by Juliette Jabkhiro and Ingrid Melander, Editing by Nick Macfie)
